The Book Review Burnout

If I’m honest writing book reviews isn’t how I imagined it would be. I thought it was a rather simple formula of you’ve read a book so now you write about it, but over time I’ve started to complicate things. I judge if I’ve written enough. Did I repeat myself too much? Have I given the plot away? Am I being too critical?

The last question is my worst worry. In fact, books I didn’t like reading I usually don’t write a review about. I feel the author took so much time to write it that who am I to belittle their work. But also a book is a product, and there are so many of them that when you feel like you’ve wasted time on one then you’ve therefore lost time for another. And isn’t the whole point of a review is to be helpful? Hopefully.

I guess what I’m really rambling on about is that I’m giving myself permission to not overthink about this blog. It is a hobby after all. A hobby born out of my rediscovery of books and how I wished to discuss them with others. So my reviews will look less formatted. Some might be long and very detailed. Some could be short with little detail at all. I would still like to review every book I’ve read in 2019, but in order to do that I have to give up my own expectations of how they should look. So here is to rediscovering why I started blogging in the first place.

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One thought on “The Book Review Burnout”

I agree I always feel slightly guilty when I write a less-than-stellar review. Like you, I think that book reviews are there to be helpful, and after all the whole reviewing business is built on subjectivity so I try and not take myself too seriously!